Do everything to bring down accident by 50 percent

DAINIK NATION BUREAU

The State Transport Minister Yashpal Arya has directed officials of various departments concerned to work in coordination to bring down the number of road accidents in the hilly regions and plains of Uttarakhand. He expressed these views while presiding a meeting of the State road safety council held in observance of the directions of high court committee regarding road safety here on Friday.

He directed departmental officials to work in coordination to curtail road accidents. The road safety related works to be undertaken by the departments should be executed expeditiously.

He directed that responsibility should be assigned individually to officials concerned for immediate and long term measures to treat the identified black spots in the State. Officials should ensure that the accidents are decreased by 50 per cent without fail on a priority basis in Nainital, Udham Singh Nagar, Dehradun and Haridwar districts from where most cases of road accidents are being reported. It must be written here that a number of people have died in recent past in road accidents.

The expected improvement could not be made in the condition of national highways and other roads, considering which the monitoring committee headed by the chief secretary and the distrit road safety committees should hold meetings regularly to consistently monitor works related to road safety.

He issued clear instructions to officials concerned to prevent riding without helmet, mobile phone use while driving, overspeeding, drunken driving, overloading and other factors which affect road safety. He also directed that the police department be assigned the responsibility of making and screening short film messages releated to road safety before every show in cinema halls.

The transport secretary D Senthil Pandiyan said that works being undertaken by various departments should be monitored consistently and in case of accident, the individual responsibility of the official concerned should be fixed.

They decided that the road safety audit will be observed, a campaign will be conducted for increasing third-party insurance, speed governors will be installed on vehicles, rules related to good Samaritans will be publicised and that the amount of penalty for traffic violations will be increased.